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Does the “mortality gap” mean low income people collect less Social Security?
It has been chronicled in many studies that higher income people tend to live longer than lower income people. Now a study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College has concluded that the mortality gap between lower and higher income people continues to widen, apparently due to an ongoing decrease in smoking by those in the higher income brackets as well as a decline in cancer and heart conditions for that demographic. According to the referenced study, that means that although the Social Security benefit formula favors lower-income workers, higher income workers – as a general rule – live longer and collect Social Security benefits longer than their lower income counterparts. Translated to financial terms, lower income workers get back a smaller percentage of the money they contributed to Social Security than those in higher income brackets, as detailed in this Motley Fool article by Dan Caplinger. Click here to read more.